Final Cut Studio 3: It's Here and It's Good!

Creative Cow by Jiggy Gaton

It was exciting and out-of-the-blue news for us when our ex-genius bar pal told us that FCP was here with an upgrade, just days after FCP 6.06 hit Kathmandu. Eager to see what 7.0 had in store for us all – in light of the 100+ great things advertised on the What’s New page – I loaded it up. I wanted to see what was broken, what has gone missing, and what it was going to take to put this new release into production.

I usually wait until I hear from others that all is well before loading new software on a production machine, so I used a late 2007/early 2008 MBP that was just collecting dust for testing. This box had a copy of FCP 2 on board with the entire set of Apple updates applied. I wanted to see just what the upgrade would break - or not! The install was a snap, and took about 15 minutes, as I added none of the new content. My FCP footprint was only increased by about 2GB, so I started thinking, hey, this is looking pretty good. In fact, the only thing difference from the Final Cut 2 install was the colour of the install screen - everything else was nice and familiar.

FCP 7.0

On launch of the new FCP 7.0, the only thing I noticed that went kaflooey were some of my system settings. It seems that all the scratch disks under system settings were reset to the default for some odd reason. I also lost all my favourite settings under Effects. But all else was fine, and my filters and plugs (Looks, Boris, FxFactory, etc.) all worked just fine in the new version. The last project I was working on in 6.06 did not automatically appear, but when I reloaded the project, all worked as it had during the prior release. read more...